We're About 100 Years Away From a Real RoboCop

We all love RoboCop. Sure, there are some morally and ethically questionable aspects of an unstoppable privatized security bot, but the armor and cyborgian capabilities are pretty freaking awesome. Whether it's in Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original or José Padilha's remake out today, RoboCop is simply as badass as it gets.

He's also almost a century away from being even remotely feasible. Why? Turns out we just don't have the battery power to operate a suit with that many moving parts for any length of time. Most iPhones barely last a full day on a charge, and a Tesla Model S can only make it about 300 miles before it needs to be plugged in—and that battery weighs more than 1,300 pounds (and is likely incapable of keep a human's organs running while being shot at).

"That's one serious limitation that our technology is not approaching yet," says Charles Higgins, an electrical engineer and professor of neuroscience at the University of Arizona. "In order to do a real RoboCop like you see in the movie, you need to have a very compact power source that's going to power all those motors all day—it doesn't look like RoboCop has to plug in every hour."

That doesn't mean, though, that we may never see real RoboCops. While our battery technology might not be up to snuff, Higgins notes that there have been brain-interfacing technology advances that show great promise, and prosthetics are getting better every day. (Hands with a sense of touch, anyone?) It's possible we could have a fully articulated robotic body connected to a brain and spinal cord like RoboCop in about 100 years, Higgins said, but unless somebody discovered a battery with 100,000 times the energy density of an iPhone battery in my iPhone, you won't be seeing it anytime soon—and certainly not by 2028, which is when the movie takes place.

Even though it's highly unlikely robot cops will be policing the streets of Detroit (or Tehran, as in Padhila's reboot), the movie's production designer maintains that reality was a major focus. Martin Whist took design cues from current advancements in prosthetics, as well as the Stealth Bomber. (He also took visual inspiration from the dark works of existentialist artist Francis Bacon, whose work appears in the office of OmniCorp CEO and, in Whist's words, gives "a subtext to the whole movie.")

"We didn't want to make up something just for the sake of 'Wow! That's the future!'" Whist says. "This idea of a guy's brain running mechanics of a robot independently is not that crazy of an idea."

To wit: brain implants. Currently, while electrodes capable of "operating" RoboCop's prosthetics and could conceivably be placed inside its brain, they'd only last perhaps two years at the most. But there are advances in electrocorticography (ECoG)—electrodes placed on the surface of the brain—that could last much longer. Research in the field shows promise for prosthetics, Higgins says.

But a brain by itself can't get anything done. To that end, Higgins gives the film credit for mentioning that Alex Murphy's brain and spinal cord are used to maneuver his RoboCop suit (though if you look at him, there's very little spine there). The spinal cord, he notes, is actually needed to coordinate the motor functions throughout the body. "They have basically the entire central nervous system there, and that's exactly what you need," Higgins says. "If you wanted to build a full humanoid robot and wanted to have it controlled like the human was controlled, then you need to preserve the spinal cord."

An ED-209 in action in the new

RoboCop. Photos courtesy Sony Pictures

And, of course, all of this brain talk could be the tip of the iceberg. What happens if we develop artificial intelligence? In both RoboCop films, the fully autonomous ED-209 is presented as a previous generation of robot protector, while RoboCop—a melding of man and machine—is the next level. That's backwards. "We're actually further away from building an ED-209 than we are from RoboCop," Higgins says. Our brains, should they be properly hooked up, are still far better at controlling robots and making decisions than anything computer-generated; building better interfaces is likely closer at hand than, well, the Singularity. (But we'll wait until Transcendence comes out in April to get into that.)

But, hey, that's what makes RoboCop so fun: It's just real enough to seem plausible (and a little unnerving) and futuristic enough to be jaw-dropping. "There are more crazy unrealistic things in movies than what we're doing," Whist says. "But Jose and I wanted very much to keep it believable for our modern world, in this century."